Timothy (3 page)

For Spindrift is now, and will always be, a part of me.

It doesn't matter whether I am lying on a beach in St. Tropez, my skin slathered with coconut oil, or I am sipping a frozen cocktail on St. Bart's, or simply sitting in a café in Vienna, enjoying a piece of strudel with a strong cup of black coffee. It matters not if I am skiing in Gstaad, or shopping in Paris, or attending a play in London's West End.

No matter how far I go, no matter how much time passes, Spindrift is always there in the back of my mind. For Spindrift was there first, and will not let go of its hold on my mind and my imagination.

I can never return to Spindrift, and doubt I would if it were possible. As much as I tried to love the house, it never welcomed me and it didn't want my love. It rejected me, and I knew I never belonged there.

For Spindrift was
his
house, and always would be.

And if Spindrift is a name that cannot ever pass my lips,
his
name is even more forbidden, a talisman that must never be said aloud.

But his name is always the last thing I hear in my dream, before I wake and hug myself for warmth; the last thing I hear, which leaves me trembling in my bed as my eyes open, as I sit up and pray my trembling will cease before it wakes up the man snoring next to me.

And his name comes to me now, when I hear the sound of the waves as my mind drifts off into the darkness of sleep, haunting me as it did when I was there in the house, haunting me no matter how far I get away from the beautiful house on Long Island.

Timothy…

It is funny to think how differently my life would have turned out had Valerie Franklin not been the kind of woman she was.

The kindest way to describe her is to say she is
difficult.

Perhaps this is unfair to Valerie, but the passage of time has yet to soften the memory of the year I endured in her employ. It was a very hard year—for she was a tough taskmaster who demanded perfection from the people who worked for her. But in fairness, she demanded no less from herself—if anything, she drove herself harder than she drove her staff. It couldn't have been easy for her to claw her way from the very bottom of the food chain to the position of executive editor of a major national magazine like
Street Talk
by the time she was forty—and there were undoubtedly many bodies left in her wake. Magazine publishing is still pretty much an old boys' club, so for a woman to rise so quickly she had to be tough—tougher than they were, and not be afraid to get her hands dirty or to play rough.

Valerie certainly had no scruples when it came to getting what she wanted out of life. She arrived at the magazine right out of college as a fresh-faced young woman of twenty-two, getting an entry-level position as a copy editor and armed with a lot of drive and ambition. Within three years she was an associate editor, and within another two years she was editor-in-chief. It took her another five years to become executive editor of
Street Talk
and the toast of Manhattan. Her rise only took ten years—which was remarkable in itself. There were, of course, nasty stories about how she accomplished this so quickly, but she certainly believed in hard work and was incredibly dedicated to her job—which was why none of her marriages or liaisons lasted very long.

So, yes, Valerie was pretty beastly to the people who worked for her. I always assumed it was because she was a woman and believed she had to prove she earned her job through hard work and talent rather than on her back.

Working for Valerie was an education, whether you loved her or hated her. Many writers and editors who learned from her became enormously successful once they left
Street Talk.
She made no excuses for herself, and therefore had no desire to hear excuses from anyone else. You either had done it properly or you hadn't. She was never angry—she never lost her temper and screamed obscenities at anyone. Rather, she lowered her voice when chastising someone, her tone dripping with the contempt and disgust she felt for failure.

It was an enormously effective technique.

I can say with relative certainty that there were several psychoses heavily involved in the makeup of her powerful personality; there was more than just a touch of obsessive-compulsion mixed carefully with a generous sprinkling of anal retention, for example. Things had to be done not only her way, but
exactly
the way she wanted them.

She had an odd relationship with men; she loved men but she didn't trust them. More than once I heard her say she wished she'd been born a gay man. Gay men were the only men she could really trust and let down her guard with, and she surrounded herself with them.

But there was also no question that Valerie Franklin was very good at her job.
Street Talk
billed itself as
the
journal of American culture, and she certainly had her finger on the pulse of what was about to become hip and trendy—the books, the movies, the television shows, the plays, the music, the clothes, the styles. She had doubled the circulation since she took over; in a time when other magazines were cutting staff and pages or closing up shop, she kept
Street Talk
not only relevant but ahead of the curve. Somehow she seemed to sense what was going to be hot—and while everyone else was scrambling to catch up with her, she'd already moved on to find the next big thing. Being profiled in the magazine was an enormous boost to anyone's career—so those with ambitions were willing to do almost anything to get that coverage. Her phone rang off the hook with invitations to anything and everything. Every day her mail was full of DVDs of soon-to-be released films, galleys of books, gifts of clothes and perfumes and new gadgetry, months before they were available to the general public.

I worked for her my first year out of college—reporting to my first day of work just three weeks after skipping my graduation ceremony.

I wish I could claim she hired me because she saw a raw talent that she desired to mold into something spectacular, but that would not be the truth. She hired me because my father had been her faculty adviser and professor when she herself was in college, and she credited him with inspiring her success. He had believed in her, pushed her, and she honestly believed that were it not for him, she would have wound up just another soccer mom in Wichita.

When my father died just before my finals, she saw giving me a start in the business as a way to repay the debt she believed she owed him.

My father was himself a multiple winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a professor of journalism at a small college in Kansas. He frequently wrote editorials for the local newspaper—which is where the Pulitzers came from—but he had no interest in the day-to-day world of a newspaper. He simply wrote his editorials and sent them in to the editor, who would squeeze them in somehow and send him a check. Sometimes he was asked to write for other papers and magazines, and most often he refused. He preferred academia to the rough-and-tumble world of the daily newspaper. He was, however, very well known and respected in the field.

Valerie Franklin was his prize pupil.

He spoke of her often. I grew up with an encyclopedic knowledge of the amazing Valerie Franklin. They spoke on the telephone at least once a week, and I know they were in constant touch via e-mail. She never visited—my father once said she'd told him when she left Kansas she would never come back, and she'd been true to her word. My father also loathed travel, rarely venturing beyond the city limits of our small college town, so I never met her before my father's funeral. My sole experience with her was speaking to her occasionally when she called and I happened to answer the phone. She was always polite, but never friendly.

My father held her example up to me on a regular basis. He subscribed to
Street Talk
magazine; years of issues were scattered throughout the dusty house I grew up in. Each time a new issue would arrive, he would pore over it with the same degree of intensity a fundamentalist would use on the Bible. Once he had read every word, he would pass it to me for me to analyze and dissect, page by page. When school was out for summer vacation—or for Christmas—he required me to write lengthy papers about each issue, what worked and what didn't, and why. She might not have ever set foot in the two-story brick house on Market Street just a few blocks away from the university campus, but Valerie Franklin's presence was felt in every cluttered room. The house was filled with mismatched ramshackle furniture, and every available surface was piled high with books, magazines, and newspapers. My mother had died when I was very young; I had no memory of her. As far as I knew, it had always been just my father and I. A local woman came in five days a week to clean and do laundry and buy groceries and make our meals. Mrs. Harris soon gave up trying to keep the clutter under control, and simply focused on things she could control—like the kitchen. My father agreed not to clutter the kitchen, and she agreed to not touch the growing piles in the other rooms. The house was dusty and every corner had cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. My father was an unrepentant smoker who couldn't be bothered to empty overflowing ashtrays, and the house always seemed to be filled with stale smoke.

There was no question I would major in anything other than journalism when I was admitted to college; there was also no question that I would attend the university where my father taught so that I could continue to keep him company in that house. The possibility of any other college was never discussed or mentioned—which was more than fine with me.

The small Kansas college town was all I knew of the world—and I was more than satisfied with it. I never thought much about the future. In retrospect, I find my childlike naïveté, and lack of planning for the future almost shameful and embarrassing. I suppose I must have believed that I would graduate and go on to teach in the journalism school, all the while continuing to live with my father. Despite his admiration for Valerie Franklin's ambition and drive, my father never tried to instill those traits in me. I was a naturally shy child who hated being called on in class and never knew how to talk to other children. I could never think of anything to say, and I had no familiarity with games or sports or any of the things other children took for granted. I grew up without friends, but never having had any, didn't actually miss them. We had no television, and only rarely would my father take me to see a movie. My companions were books, magazines, and newspapers. The written word was God in our household, and must be paid regular obeisance.

It also didn't help knowing that I was attracted to boys. I cannot remember a time when I didn't know—and that difference, in an incredibly conservative town that seemed to have a church on every other corner, made me withdraw even further into myself.

I don't know if my father ever knew or figured it out.

Every day I walked to class and then came home to read and study. I kept to myself and was a pretty decent student.

My father died shortly before my graduation from college. He had always had an aversion to doctors—which had something to do with their inability to save my mother when she was dying—and he hated being lectured about his smoking. I don't even remember the last time he'd actually been to see a doctor for a routine checkup. The years of smoking and Mrs. Harris's traditional style of cooking had taken their toll on his heart, and a week before my graduation he had a massive heart attack and died in his sleep.

I was suddenly an orphan, and the death of my only relative pulled the rug out from under me. I had applied for jobs, at newspapers and magazines, with no luck. When it became obvious that a job in my field simply wasn't going to happen, my father suggested graduate school—and I perhaps should feel some shame in the fact that he used his influence to get me accepted, even though the deadline for applications had already passed.

But once he died, everything changed.

To my horror, I discovered there was no money left. Unfortunately, I had never given money much thought growing up, and it was a subject my father never discussed with me. He'd always discouraged me from getting a job and just gave me cash whenever I needed any, telling me there was plenty of time left for me to work once I was finished with school. I rarely needed anything more than a twenty here and there, to get a soda or something on campus. Since he was on the faculty, my tuition had been free—and for books and my clothes, he always used a credit card. He'd never owned a car, and I didn't even have a driver's license.

He left behind no life insurance, no savings, nothing other than a checking account with less than a hundred dollars in it. There was no money to pay for a funeral—fortunately he had bought a plot adjacent to my mother's when he had to bury her. It was typical him, of course—he was a terrible procrastinator and often put things off as long as he possibly could. It shouldn't have come as such a surprise to me that he'd not thought about his own death or made any plans for that eventuality.

He didn't, after all, like to think about things he considered unpleasant.

There was nothing left but debt—and a lot of it. His attorney, Lucas Sharpe—who'd also been one of his regular poker buddies—advised me against trying to keep the house, since it was his only asset. “Sell it to settle the debt,” he told me, and tried to explain the tangled financial mess my father had left behind. I didn't understand all the legalities, the ins and outs—there had been bad investments, apparently, followed by loans from banks and against credit cards to make other investments intended to make up the original losses, and
that
money was lost in other bad investments, and on and on it went until the debt had reached such a staggering figure that I could only stare at Mr. Sharpe in disbelief.

I had always believed my father to be an intelligent man—but this record of compulsive and almost obsessive failure forced me to see him in an entirely different light—one that wasn't particularly flattering.